I’m starting to wonder if I’m out of touch with the gaming community. I don’t have any of the current generation consoles. I have never played WoW. Because of this a lot of the stuff I read or listen to about new games doesn’t really apply to me.

I really got to thinking about this when listening to the latest episode of the Rebel FM Podcast that features ex-staffers of Electronic Gaming Monthly. In it they had a discussion of the feel of shooters. Throughout it all they were talking about console shooters. It was then that I found myself becoming a computer-gaming-fanboy.

I kept saying, “You are talking about console-First-Person-Shooters and therefore your opinion is irrelevant!” In my opinion playing a First-Person Shooter on a console is like playing basketball with a flat ball. Sure you can do it but I can’t imagine why anyone would actually do it if they had the ability to do it the right way. Halo may have had some nice play mechanics like the regenerating shield but it is the Candy Land of shooters — it is fun for little kids but any normal adult should tire of it quickly.

So am I just out of touch? Is it possible that Halo isn’t lame (I find that hard to accept)? Or is everyone else just crazy? (The truth is probably somewhere in between…)

Regarding Ebert, he ends by asking, “Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?” which echoes my own call for all of us to stop caring about “art.” Tons and tons of people have tried to convince him he’s wrong — so many in fact that I don’t even want to bother hunting down links to some of the stories that do it. I’m not interested in arguing with him because I don’t really care if he thinks games are art or not.

However, it is very disconcerting that he seems to think that he can judge games by looking at screenshots. Would he write a review of a film based on the text on the back of the dvd box? That’s pretty ignorant to think that he can judge games in that manner.

Unfortunately, this is just the top of the iceberg because look at the picture at the top of his post. Now I have no idea if he picked that picture or not. I would say that he probably didn’t but he did pick the rest of the pictures in the post so perhaps he did. Regardless, the picture didn’t just appear by itself. Someone chose that picture. What is in that picture? A kid. So someone whether it was Ebert of just some random web guy, wanted to pick a picture of a gamer and they picked a kid — once again perpetuating the stereotype that games are for kids and in this instance also seemingly indicating that games are in and of themselves childish. Wow. That’s pretty sad.

If the most well known person who thinks videogames cause aggression doesn’t think they make you violent then that makes the case that they are so bad that we need laws against selling them much harder to prove.

Personally, I look forward to the SCOTUS shutting down these kinds of laws once and for all.

…well that and Jack Thompson getting involved and saying some crazy things…

Of course there’s two little details that neither of the two stories linked to above or any of the other stories I saw seemed to mention: First, The MPAA rating system “is a voluntary system” and the ratings are not legally enforced. The only possible grounds for a lawsuit that there would be would be under obscenity or pornography laws. Levco almost certainly knows this. So why is he causing a stir? That leads to the second missing detail: Levco is running for re-election.

So this is just a ploy to get into the headlines so that Levco can say he is “fighting for families” and concerned about “family values” without having to do anything. The minute I heard this story I immediately wondered if the guy was up for re-election because that’s the only time public officials try to start legal proceedings related to media. I guess Levco couldn’t find any easy videogame targets.

Heaven forbid that any of the media outlets that aired this story would take two minutes to wonder why Levco was doing this or anything… That’s some good reportering there…

Related

Halo is lame actually(it’s a veritable swirl of cool colors vomited into the disc tray), but don’t let that fool you into thinking the consoles are totally inferior. Sure with things such as DX10, and the ability to easily swap gear in and out on the fly the PC is the go-to platform (and my favorite genre, the point-and-click adventure, while on the Wii in the form of Sam and Max, will never hit a 360 or PS3)

However, think in terms of Goldeneye. Remember in the 64 era when people screamed “ludicrous!” and “witch! Burn the witch!” at the thought of a first person shooter on a console. That turned out rather well.

Sometimes I have that “I just want it to work” attitude. While I certainly love to crowd around my Radeon 4800, 4GB ram, dual core processor machine… half the fun in the PC gaming community is messing around with the features. I don’t so much like that on certain games.

Example: Grand Theft Auto IV on the PC is a wreck of a port… my PC is AT LEAST as powerful as a 360 if not more so…and GTAIV chugs on high settings, and the game goes to “very high”…to get a somewhat playable game I have to either play my 360 copy, or turn everything off on my PC version.

Console FPSs on the other hand take some time to get used to, for sure. It’s all in taste really. I own Fallout 3 for PC and 360, and found myself playing my 360 version much more abundantly due to the constant connectivity that Xbox Live allows. If I’m stuck I can usually “phone a friend” over the head set, and they will be like “Oh yeah, I do remember that…here is how to work around it”
Sure you can do it on PC, but not with the quick access a 360 has.

What I’d be more concerned with is how they expect to get away with RTS’s on consoles… I’ve yet to play a good one… most are sloppy port jobs, with poor controls.

I still think PCs are better for gaming, and PC gaming a more rich, varied experience than the console side of things can be. However, I switched over due to cost reasons. I was continually updating PCs, spending hundreds of dollars, if not thousands, a year on near-bleeding-edge videocards, CPUs, & RAM.

I jumped over to the Xbox 360 for cost reasons, and all my friends had switched over to the console, leaving me behind.

One thing made it possible for me (well, 2 things): the XIM and the XFPS Sniper keyboard & mouse adapter. After some tweaking of the software configs, the experience is virtually identical to what I used to get gaming on the PC… Cost: Around $90 for a pre-built XIM (but the plans are out there to build your own, if you’re tech-inclined & good with a solder gun), around $90 for the XFPS Sniper keyboard/mouse adapter, & around $40 for a Logitech wired controller which allows the gismo to synch up to my Xbox 360. Throw in an el cheapo Xbox 360 VGA cable & I’m gaming on the same monitor, keyboard, & mouse that I use for PC games.

I think Halo is an excellent game for the sheer quality of the online experience. The matchmaking system beats any other game hands down in terms of ease, fairness and reliability. Add to this the endless number of game types that can be created thanks to the wonderful variety of options (grifball anyone?) and you are left with an excellent game. Halo may not have the aesthetics of many modern FPS’s but in a market filled with Unreal Engine pallid greys and browns it certainly stands out. One cannot forget the single player either, a story filled with moral relativism and religious fanatacism, very contemporary in many ways, whilst retaining some of the key features of traditional sci-fi. Also the feat of having a hero that we never see below the mask of, yet still feel empathy with, is not a small one. Console pads are not as sensitive as mouse and keyboard but there is something pleasing about the ‘3Dness’ of using the analog sticks and lets be honest how long are we going to be using pads to control consoles? Especially in the light of the infra-red technology recently acquired by Microsoft. Consoles are accessible, Xbox live is accessible and a console lasts for five years rather than five minutes,as with PCs!